That we live in a secular age there can be no doubt. I’ve attacked secularism as a paper tiger (actually, Berlin Wall) in a number of posts, which is why I looked forward to reading James K.A. Smith’s How (Not) To be Secular. (It’s a book about a book, Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age.) In it he uses a phrase that is very helpful in combating the fundamental presumption of secularism (which includes all the Triple A’s: Atheists, Agnostics, and the Apathetic): that it is only the “religious” who need faith, or who have to believe. On page 47 of the paperback version he states:
Our secular age is the product of creative new options, an entire reconfiguration of meaning. So it’s not enough to ask how we got permission to stop believing in God; we need to also inquire about what emerged to replace such belief. Because it’s not that our secular age is an age of disbelief; it’s an age of believing otherwise. We can’t tolerate living in a world without meaning.
One of the most important things we can teach our children if we are to help them establish an enduring Christian faith is to show them that all worldviews require faith, or a belief or trust in some explanation for the nature of reality. It’s staggering to me that anyone would deny this, but it’s the fundamental assumption (a thought itself that can’t be proved and itself requires faith or belief) of secularism. It’s why in a secular age Christians always seem to be on the defensive, and the Triple’s A’s think they have no need to defend what they believe.
I’ve always known this to some degree, but it was Tim Keller’s The Reason for God that crystallized for me how important this is. Keller puts it this way:
But even as believers should learn to look for reasons behind their faith, skeptics must learn to look for a type of faith hidden within their reasoning. All doubts, however skeptical or cynical they may seem, are really a set of alternative beliefs. You cannot doubt Belief A except from a position of faith in Belief B (Introduction).
In my book I call what the secularists are doing an “objectivity double standard.” In other words, they claim to be objective because they believe they don’t need to believe, all the while insisting that we religious folks have to believe (which for them means believing in something without evidence), and thus can’t be “objective.” Trying to convince one of the Triple A’s that they live by faith as much as any other finite human being is almost always a fool’s errand, but it’s a piece of cake convincing our children of this simple fact of existence. If we learn how to do this effectively, and it isn’t hard, we will increase the odds of building in our children an enduring, lifelong, and eternal, faith.
The question then becomes our faith verses theirs, and which best explains the nature of reality as we find it. This is why when I discovered abductive reasoning or logic, my faith became all but indestructible. This kind of reasoning can also be called inference to the best explanation, which in turn leads us to the amazing explanatory power of Christianity. One of legions of examples will have to suffice. What best explains us, the world, and the universe we inhabit? A random, cosmic accident of matter that existed eternally, and that by total coincidence somehow for no reason at all “created” it, or God? It’s not at all difficult to convince our children which is the better answer.
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